


Mother The Mountain

by badwips



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:25:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwips/pseuds/badwips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of moments in Rustin Cohle's youth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1966, 1969, 1980

**Author's Note:**

> [fanmix](http://8tracks.com/99takes/mother-the-mountain)

Birthed by the earth, he heard, when they had still gone on family visits looking for answers. A grab-and-take person, not owed by the world. She sought her own.

“We’re all allotted some, Rustin.  Each person has their deserved piece. Your mother wanted more than double.”

Her clothes, her photos, every personal and private thing bar her purse, left to sun-bleach in the house in Galveston.  Items of jewellery belonging to her grandma. Well-thumbed books. All tear-stained, until one day pop had forgotten to cry, forgotten to clutch.

Two years old and talking, asking where momma is, and as if the woman had died, all those once beloved items went to her son, furring with dust as he grew. At five, he didn’t remember her face, or her hands. Sense memory didn’t transfer in what she left behind. Rust was too small to carry any of it.

He found her again when he could have held onto it all; her sweaters folded and stashed away in boxes still stacked in the corner of the cabin as if used for bearing. Pop bought the necessaries after he’d already loaded his truck, the family house had not been left looking lived-in, but the boxes were never opened. He had wanted a fresh and uninhibited start. Always a hypocrite, signing forms only to burn them.

Maybe Rust finding sign of her when he had grown so self-aware, constantly assured that he didn’t need a mother, meant that somewhere, she thought of her son.

Rough wool in three different shades of brown. It scratched as if Rust wasn’t giving due reverence. Holding the sweaters to him wasn’t enough; he could catch the punchy smell of incense and the warmth of the land, under soft floral laundry, only for a little while. Unfolding them, he found a few long dark blonde hairs and lost them as quick as he held them up to the light. The sweater rode tight under his armpits when he pulled it on, too–broad shoulders and broadening further, it would stretch as long as he wore it. If he couldn't, he would tie it around his waist to keep it with him.

For once, pop said nothing.


	2. 1962, 1964, 1966

On the weekends, he’d drive his college friends to town, and they would watch the protesters. Travis would rather drink his beer than throw it; as much as he found the effeminate men and hysterical women grating, they certainly had a right to do what they wanted, and as he skulked the streets, he’d consider how much he didn’t want to go to war.

This was how he saw her, not too far from the rest, unique in her solitude. A black and white peace pin attached to the front of her bright pinafore dress, a pale woman in a booth seat in a bar, alone.

“You waiting for them?” Travis stepped into her eyeline and chucked his thumb over his shoulder, _ban, ban, ban_ not sounding like a word anymore as it filtered through, over the jukebox. She regarded him, his Marine haircut not doing him any favors, but her look was dreamy. She hummed a short note, neither here nor there, and shrugged like she couldn’t care less. He sat down across from her.

“Why’nt you out there with ‘em?”

“Looks like I should be, doesn’t it?” Her voice was flat and cultured, he was genuinely surprised when he found out she’d always lived in the same town. “We’re not a hive mind.” Defensive as she is, Travis holds up his hands, “I ain’t part of nothing like that neither.”

She believes him.

After that, on the weekends, he’d drive to town alone, and spend his time with her. He’d tell her all about the routine he was made to follow, how he’d like it better if he didn’t have to answer to anyone, they’d swap dreams after sleeping together and he’d always say, “we gotta leave this place.” She’d hum her note and look at him like her dreams were so much bigger but he could never really tell. Dreams were an intoxicant that could only last so long.

_Galveston, oh Galveston, I am so afraid of dying._

He remembers this song playing when he first met her, even though it wasn’t. It’s sympathy they all pretend not to need,  they all talk like they’re already back home, or anywhere else. Their family farms, the city, the Grand fucking Canyon. Alaska. Travis only had one tour to do, and he’d die before he had to do another. Most of his friends did.

Concern for him came and went, she didn’t let it stop her from living. They were close, but in the end, too different. Now the only thing really connecting them was a child. A screaming cuckoo thrust into its mother’s arms unclean, a pattern of her blood rusting on him.

Travis returned less than heroic, with fight left in him, expecting to pick up where he thought they’d left off; to him there was nothing to rebuild, even as he was treading on the pieces. He grew sick of the sweat on his brow, the ever-present heat that stirred his mind up with echoes, and eventually the woman and child who didn't know him. Wasn’t there for first steps, first teeth; the first word his son said to him was, ‘who?’

Grown from dirt and stuck in it. Backwards thinking, that was her problem.

He laughed at her, her tiny world. They’d talked about moving, he remembered. He held that in his head when his friends were being torn up around him; he always had the ability to get away, but he was blind no matter which way he was running.

It would take them to the edge of everything.

Happy Valley, Alaska.

Barely visible on a map, from above it would look nothing more than forest; industry was concentrated on the trees and the wildlife, up to the inlet the town sat guard besides, but not in charge of. Wasn't the type of town where anyone wanted to be in charge. A town for a working man, who would rather not spend time with other working men if he didn't have to. Every now and then it would attract a glut of hopeful types, groups wanting the feeling of the wild, and an affordable lodge with a nearby bar, the kind who liked to be able to give back a gun after they'd used it.

"They got everything a man needs out there, just hidden."

“What do they have for me, in all that nothing?" Gentle fingers in Rust’s hair as she stares his father down, eyes dark in the blue half-light of a child’s bedroom. He pretends to sleep, listens and doesn't understand, simply bathes in the colors of the words she’s whispering over him. ‘What is there for your son?’ Her soft voice is a bleating alarm, words ringing unremittingly, Travis can't answer, and when he finally vocalizes the true extent of his plan, what should be their plan, she's already put hers into effect.

Rust’s mother didn't believe in telling fortunes, but she’d thrown the bones and seen that the life she’d planned didn’t contain this stranger. Sacrifices get made in order to see what the future holds.


	3. 1969, 1974, 1976

A great silver serpent undulating through the gold, to the imagined so bright and clean, the undiscovered country to be feared less than the radio, the news between the top forty hits. Snow turns to slush and sludge; Travis, too determined to pay attention, Rust seeing it with eclipsed eyes. The journey could last months, he has little perception, and the shining Sterling Highway loops, infinitely.

The little town had a name like a fairytale and it was everything Travis wanted, the cabin itself, more. Hand built, set way back from the road, pop was only comfortable somewhere he could hide. There were pictures in his head that wouldn't fade and as soon as he was told about the Valley, it became one of them. Father and son, far from even the small congregation of buildings by the wide water. 

Schoolbus would pick Rust up from a corner near the forest, the barrier between civilisation and his home. He would have been awake since first light, helping Travis prepare for his self-imposed work program. Soot of sleeplessness beneath his eyes, staining his young face. Nearly every day, other kids whose families had lived in the area for generations would try and torment Rust simply for existing in the manner pop had chosen for him, their insults were varying in creativity from "freaky fucker", to "Robot Cohle". For seven years he barely said a single word in retaliation, he knew he should be there as much as it never felt permanent, he could pretend sometimes and fit in, laugh for a little while, smiling naturally through his imperfect disguise. The road didn't lose its dreamlike qualities, Rust could still imagine staying on it forever or until the end of the Earth. The children were dropped in the neighboring town, Ninilchik, in front of a church, otherworldly in its opulent beauty, golden decorations, a green roof always seeming freshly painted. The graveyard with its crooked crosses was more populous than either of the settlements.

The boys in town would sweep away the snow to clear the route to the church and there would be a girl, in overalls, trouser cuffs dark from snowmelt above her boots. Light in bearing, her laugh. If she cracked a joke in class, Rust would slowly warm to her and reassure her in his head if she slipped over a word when reading aloud. She was loud. A comet continuing her path, he should never have expected her to stay, and shouldn’t have been as upset as he was when she didn’t. The girl had enthused about her favourite books at great length, and Rust would nod to himself from across the room like he was there at her elbow, with his hand on the back of her neck. He noticed too late that he changed around her, positively, and in shame for wanting that, he confined himself to the tiny school library, where each book was always in its place, and the stories would take him away to where rules didn't usually matter. 

He doesn't see God in the trees or the mountains, the rivers, the carcasses delivered to the factories. He doesn't see God in the word. He doesn't see God in his father.

His fingers are riddled with paper cuts and the backs of his hands are black and blue, bruised knuckles. Pop doesn't pull him out of school until he hits back, when he's taller than the other kids and, he's heard them say, meaner. As he'd wished to since they arrived, Travis began to lay down his law.

Wordless journeys out of state and the road is finally dull, meeting family members that are plain strangers and pop doesn't tell him why, but he makes an educated guess. They speak well of _her_ , then their voices become definitive blockades, it's not often they visit the same people twice. Pop is not well-liked by her family, or his own. It only takes a year or so for his drive to wane, when they've run out of people to ask. "Shoulda done this when you were a kid, Rustin. Would have worked out better."

Twelve years old and he's a man, his school is his daddy's wisdom, his beliefs are his habits, the habitual is his entirety and the only religion his father upholds is the hunt. Nearly every day, Rust has a new routine to follow. Make a fire. Make coffee. Turn on the radio, news and weather. The bad news is over. He dresses himself as a skewed mirror image of his father, dark colors under white, slate grey that doesn't change, dulls his senses. It's a break for a little while, until they get out into the snow and the world opens up. 


	4. 1976, 1979, 1980

Mountains shook if you looked through the downfall, a soft, slight sound, but Rust wasn’t to look up too much, to much, when what was important was the breakage of twigs, a line of half moon smudges indented on the invisible trail just ahead of them.  
Before he got his height, he would wade with the drifts up to his chest, freezing his insides so he felt turned inside-out, his guts on show and shining purple, losing their ghosts. He would follow the glint of his pop’s military-issue pistol, oiled and holstered on the back of his belt. Sight was fleeting if he chose it to be, snow blindness sounded better, laying in his cot with a rag over his eyes, watching dots of red and blue dancing behind his eyelids, an orchestra playing somewhere distant, and Travis would say “no special treatment,” as he’d hand Rust an extra blanket.  
He sometimes achieved this luxury of warmth when he came back to find the cabin empty, the days when pop would take a large part of the week’s kill to sell it. When he was no longer in school, he would search these moments out, to wrap himself up and read or draw while his hands weren’t trembling. He would listen for pop driving back, go out to greet him; a mirror of when the bus would drop Rust home, when he’d make his way back and the second he was in range of the cabin, Travis would find him, inform him of every moment of his day and Rust would nod, begin to switch his brain off.  
Lying awake and watching the light change, hearing his father murmur sharp sounds in his sleep, Rust would consider that pop might wake up different, but he let that thought pass after his first week without leaving home. Without school as a respite, Travis moulded Rust’s life entirely. The sisters had at least asked for his opinion, sometimes, pop was always telling, telling, telling. Except for when he was working, Travis talked incessantly, as if all of his thoughts were held on the back of his tongue. Instructions, ideas, all of it was gospel, and Rust listened closely to discern the needed truth.

"D'you see them, the dotted line? Shoulder of the king, son, there's his crown-- call it the stag. All of the shapes are animals, just like we catch. Not like any one word could describe all of that, above us."

"Yes, sir."

He wondered how much of this unhinged insight he had allowed to seep into him, when he believed in everything Travis said, when he looked up at him as the monster in the story that could kill the child, but was happy if the child did what the monster wanted.  
It was a joke, when they would duck at the clap and clatter of wings above them and Travis would lift his bow to follow the streak of feathers. Helicopters, planes, he would aim for them like fair game, catching Rust’s eye and smiling so sure of himself, beneath his bandana. The fear that he would bring one down dwindled with the frequency, he couldn’t let one go unless he was distracted and when Travis was focused, Rust’s fear was thinking of himself as something his father would shoot. That never lessened much. Grown, Rust observed that Travis’ nature was nothing so simple as good, or kind. He gave in the sense that letting Rust die would affect his own survival. He gave in the sense that he was emptying, emptying, emptying to become an empty man, a brittle surface already veined with cracks.  
Tracking through streams of snowmelt didn’t help them any; it was easy to be lax in the warmer months or when the sun set slow, hearing came easier without the freeze and the soundproofing of it, and so came distant others, saws and dogs and there was always music. It would have been easier again if the appearance of anything green didn’t stir Travis’ brain into a new disarray, had him putting up new defences. Rust wanted to ask him if he knew where he was, there seemed to be no need when they always ended up back home.  
Mapping the immediate area, estimating from the ground level as far as they could walk. They both made mistakes, early on, a glancing or weak shot would cause an animal to thrash its last, spooking anything else away. Through Travis’ inaccuracy, they would come face to face with farms, animals so docile it seemed as if they had been dropped from above. The exaggerated rectangular body of a cow didn’t seem natural, nothing shaped that way had any purpose beyond a livestock pen, nothing confronting Rust and his father unafraid. He lifted his gloved hand to the animal’s velvet nose.

“Don’t touch ‘em.”

Travis snatched Rust away, like he’d witnessed something secret; there was more, always more, and no reason to wonder what would happen if their store ran dry, or the herds never came back. On the bus someone had asked Rust what he would do, what his father would do if he couldn’t catch anything. He had thought of the traps on the wall, above his bed.

He had thought there was no real room for error.

The only time pop seemed genuinely proud was when Rust made a clean kill. He’d give him a beer and Rust would then have to steady himself. He’d start on thoughts of being better than his father could be, in every sense, and how he could make another clean kill by pressing his knife into the patch of skin behind his daddy’s ear, push it in until the hewn antler handle looked like a part of him.


End file.
